1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to routing information packets in a network involving a plurality of traffic carrying networks, and more particularly to an improvement in routing described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,081.
2. Description of the Background Art
The present invention is an improvement on the invention of improvement in routing described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,081, and assigned to the assignee hereof. Additional background information can be found the aforesaid patent, as well as in the book entitled “Internet Routing Architectures” by Bassam Halabi, New Riders Publishing, 1997, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference.
As indicated in U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,081, column 6, lines 62-66, a PNAP or “Private Network Access Point” can be thought of as being made up of two halves. One half connects to customers. The other half connects to NSPs or “National Service Providers”.
The Internet is a network of networks. A PNAP contains an ASimilater that determines the Internet interconnection matrix. ASimilater servers residing within the PNAP collect and collate the routing data received from Network Service Providers 1.1 (NSPs) to build a database of how the Internet is interconnected. The database shows the NSPs connected to the PNAP are interconnected as well as how they are connected to their customers. The PNAP receives each NSP's perspective of the Global Routing Table which, when collated, includes identical routes from multiple NSPs, and that distillation of the sum of each NSP's view of the Global Routing Table is used to direct traffic from the customer to the destination over the optimal path via another PNAP customer if available or, otherwise, one of the NSP's connected to the PNAP.